


after the storm

by elliptical



Series: a prophet and a psychic [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Fluff without Plot, M/M, Mental Health Issues, No Sex, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Non-Sexual Submission, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, non-sexual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-26 04:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3836557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Psi needs to let someone else take him apart.<br/>Sometimes Signless needs to feel useful.<br/>They make it work.</p><p>Literally just self-indulgent pale fluff without plot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	after the storm

**Author's Note:**

> everything happening here is enthusiastically consensual -- everything not explicitly discussed consent-wise within the fic is based on pre-established relationship dynamics and routines, which have been explicitly discussed offscreen. psi's in a pretty vulnerable mental state (esp in the beginning) that might be alarming, and there's some very brief implications of past abuse, but that's about it warning-wise.
> 
> takes place a few perigrees before breathing the ashes starts, but the two works can exist independently.
> 
>  
> 
> _i won't die alone and be left there_  
>  _i guess i'll just go home or god knows where_  
>  _because death is just so full and man so small_  
>  _i'm scared of what's behind and what's before_  
>  _and there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears_  
>  _and love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears_  
>  _-after the storm, mumford and sons_

It always takes Psi at least three hours to get ready for a paledate – not because he’s worried about how brightly his teeth will shine when he’s nuzzled up against you, but because he won’t surrender his control for even one second without absolute certainty things are fine. Which means he has to take sixty to ninety minutes to check his comms and type furiously into his husktop, and then he has to take another hour to meditate on the various scraps of psychic knowledge in his pan, and then he has to take another hour to walk around your camp and check the ratio of high-to-lowbloods in the town. And then sometimes for good measure, he has to check his husktop again.

You don’t mind. He works himself into exhaustion for you, physically and mentally, no matter how many times you tell him he doesn’t have to. Idle moments make him anxious, so he tends to work and work and bottle things up until they’re on the verge of erupting, and then he comes to you.

Most of the time Psi is perfectly controlled, his posture stiff but his movements fluid, his expressions blank. There are cracks, of course – when he sobs into your shoulder after he wakes shrieking from day terrors, when he curls into secluded corners in the midst of a migraine, when he snarls at potential threats, and most importantly when he genuinely smiles. The control is more like a plaster dam slapped over a boiling ocean of too-deep emotions and past trauma. When he first met you, there were no cracks, his pan so used to pain and grief and terror that he’d thrown the dam up between his consciousness and his feelings.

There’s a disconnect, still. He doesn’t know how _not_ to feel so hard it hurts (something you can empathize with a little too much), he doesn’t know how to work through pain without lashing out like a frightened animal, and he doesn’t know how to keep all of his mind grounded on one plane of reality. So he throws up his walls, because he scares himself, and he figures being the cold strategist of the group beats being perfectly adjusted.

There’s something to it – you have only seen him out-of-control once and it shook you so hard you couldn’t sleep for three days. He did apologize for lunging at your wife, and for trying to bite your hand off before you papped him back into coherence, but he’s never quite been sorry for the rest of it. He feels too hard, and now that he’s not operating under the same dissociative fugue he was under slavery, he can’t _stop_ feeling too hard, so pushing things down doesn’t _work._

Which is where you come in. Moirallegiance didn’t make much sense to you, before you met him. The idea of one person being responsible for pacifying another, of that weight of obligation in a relationship… it felt like one of the many lies society has told you is necessary. And maybe sometimes it is. But with Psi, your relationship doesn’t feel like a burden. You’re a lovesick idiot and you want to hold him and let him rest and keep him safe forever, and you’d want that even if he didn’t come to you sparking or frantic or hyperventilating, so you’re going to marinate in your ability to snuggle 5eva.

You spend his three hours of preparation putting together the most comfortable pile you can wrangle, an intricate nest of pillows and blankets and the occasional clean laundry. Then you make sure you’ll have everything you need for tonight, and then you let Di and Rosa both know you can't be disturbed today, and then you chew on the end of a pen and scratch out sermon notes until you feel him enter.

And feel him enter you do. The door opens, but the sound is nothing compared to the sudden crackle of static in the air, making the hair on your arms stand straight up. You swivel your chair around as Psi nudges the latch closed.

He straightens up and turns to you, his tongue flicking out over his lips. The control he's been clinging to shatters, his face crumpling as he slumps back against the door. “Everything’s…” he starts, but trails off as his gaze unfocuses. “Everything’s not, not, I – I – I – I fu-ucked _up._ ”

The stutter is not a good sign. He talks like that when his pan is skipping around, flashing through whispers and memories and visions too fast to process them. His body trembles, and he presses his palms against the wood behind him.

“Everything’s,” he tries again, his mouth mangling just the one word, “fffucked up. I _fucked up._ ”

It’s not easy to communicate with him during one of these episodes, because his thoughts are sharp edges and fragments that he can’t quite parse into sentences. “Fucked up past, present, or future?”

“I – I – I – fuck!” With one hand, he rips his headband off and grasps a handful of curly hair, tugging hard. “Not… I don’t, I don’t undersssthtand why, why I’d, I don’t…”

Future, then. 

“Psi, love,” you murmur, just to be sure. “Are we safe?” When he opens his mouth, you add, “Not in the future. Present tense, right now, this moment. Are we safe?”

A second passes, and then he gives a tight nod.

“Okay.” You stand and beckon him toward you. “Is it okay for me to take over?”

His shoulders hunch forward, and some of the agitation on his face evaporates at the words. “Please,” he breathes.

“Come here.”

When he moves over to you, you gently wrap your arms around his waist, rubbing circles on his upper back. He’s taller than you, so he slings his arms over your shoulders and buries his nose into your hair, his body trembling in a ceaseless shiver.

You guide him to the pile, easing him onto the blankets and laying down next to him, rolling him over so that you’re spooning him from behind. Your hand shifts to rubbing circles on his chest and abdomen instead, mouth pressing a soft kiss to the back of his neck.

“Now tell me what’s wrong.”

“I…” His breath hitches on a sob. “I _fucked up,_ ” he says again, helplessly – he doesn’t have the coherence to rephrase. “Fucked up, fucked up, fucked up so bad I don’t – I don’t – this isn’t even real, not fucking real, what if I wa-ake up and it’s all _beeping_ and it won’t _stop_ and they won’t _shut up…_ ”

“Psi.” A faint tinge of alarm colors your tone. “Love, you’re right here. You’re right here, we’re right here.”

“’Snot real, though, t-time doesn’t _matter_ ,” he says. “Could be, be, be reliving it, could wake up five hundred sweeps out, ‘sall the same, all the same, everything exists all at once I can’t do it I can’t do it I don’t want all of this Sign Sign Sign get it _OUT OF ME_ ” –

“Do you need to scream?”

“Yes, yesyesyes, please, please, fuck,” and you turn him back around and scoot up and press his face firmly into your shoulder, careful not to poke yourself on his horns, and he opens his mouth and shrieks against your skin. They’re awful, guttural howls, the sound of a man who’s seen far too much and had far too little time to process it, too clearly troll-like to belong to a dying animal, too animalistic to be controlled. They bore into your pan and ring on the inside of your skull, but you can’t soothe the pain until he’s had the chance to burn off his edges, and it’s like your mother always told you when you’d get sick as a wiggler. Better out than in.

He screams his throat raw over the next twenty minutes while you hold him as tightly as you can, his body twitching and shuddering in your grasp. Eventually, when he’s settled enough to just cry softly against the crook of your neck, you curl your fingers around one of his larger horns and tug his head back.

The skin around his eyes is a bruised yellow from sleep deprivation, and his face is so coated in tears and snot it’s hard to tell which is which. He hasn’t sparked once, which is good, but the feel of static is still heavy in the air. His lips are dry and cracked. He’s panting, on the verge of hyperventilating, and you can tell he’s not really seeing you at all.

Now that he’s vented off enough pain to be properly calmed, you can do the active part of your job. “Love, look at me.”

His blinks and focuses for approximately half a second before drifting off again, so you dig your claws into the root of his horn. That gets his attention, his eyes lighting as he stares at you. You sit up, tugging him with you, and brush your other hand against his cheek.

“I am real,” you tell him.

He hums, but he’s dangerously close to drifting again, so you dig your claws in harder. “Look at me. Psi, look at me. I am in charge here and I say I’m real, so it doesn’t matter what kind of hoofbeastshit your pan’s throwing at you. I am real. You are right here, with me, right now. Nothing exists except me, okay? You’re right here, right now, and nothing else has to be real until we’re done.”

He wets his lips with his tongue and croaks, “O-kay.”

“That’s better.” You soften your tone as he surfaces. “I need all of you here with me, okay, love? Out of the past and out of the future. They don’t exist until we’re done. Bring them all back, just focus, there you go.” You hum, running your thumb underneath one of his sleep-bruised eyes. “All of you here with me right now. Outside doesn’t matter. All that matters is staying here with me. I’ll take care of you, I promise. Can you do that?”

His tongue swipes over his mouth again. “Yeah,” he says, sounding a lot more like usual, save the hoarseness.

“You with me?”

“Yeah,” he says again, and you relax your grip on his horn. “Yeah, I’m good. Sorry, I…”

“Shoosh. No apologizing in the pile.”

“Mmrnghtph.” He wrinkles his nose. “You don’t have to, uh, keep going if you don’t want. I'm calmer. I mean I think I’m functional for the moment.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“It’s just, if you don’t want…”

“Do _you_ want me to stop?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Neither do I. I know you think I’m full of shit but I really like taking care of you.”

“But if you didn’t want…”

“If I didn’t want to do something, I would tell you. The feelings thing works both ways, in case you’d forgotten.” You lean up to kiss his forehead. “When I ask your permission for things, or I ask if you’re sure about something, it’s because I want to make sure you’re okay with it, all right? If you ever don’t want to do something – for any reason, which also includes just not being in the mood – I want you to tell me too, yeah?”

This is a discussion (or maybe just a lecture) you’ve had before, but it doesn’t hurt to remind him every now and again. Psi is capable of setting limits, he’s just not always good at it. He has a tendency to push himself too hard, because of depression and stubbornness and sweeps of ingrained conditioning. The first time he told you to back the fuck off you were honestly relieved, because before that you were a constant mess of worry about taking too much control and hurting him and not even knowing.

Now, though, he’s nodding. “I’ll tell you. I promise.”

“Okay, so, keeping that in mind, I was thinking that I could spend the rest of this date giving you a bath, pampering the fuck out of you, and then blissing you out for as long as you want. Does that all sound okay?”

“Mmm.” He offers you one of his rare genuine smiles, removed from his usual insincere grins and cackling. “Sounds depraved, of course I’m down.”

“To be fair, you think everything sounds depraved.”

“I am surrounded by debauchery. What can I say?”

“Well, first thing’s first.” You dig around under the blankets piled against the corner of the room until you unearth your Very Important Pale Bag. From it, you take a water bottle and a protein bar, passing them over. It takes a little more digging to find the chapstick and throat-soothing cough drops at the bottom, but you nudge them at him too. “You’ve been licking your lips more than Di when she’s watching an antlerbeast from afar. Please for the love of fuck, hydrate. And also you haven’t been eating nearly enough.”

“I eat just as much as the rest of you!”

“Psi,” you say, torn between unrelenting patience and exasperation, “you burn energy about four times faster than the rest of us, you probably need to eat more than us combined.”

“Oh.” He takes a moment to consider this. “Wow, yeah, I probably do.”

And now you’re torn between further exasperation and a sharp stab of pity, because he can be an oblivious tool but it doesn’t even occur to him that he doesn’t have to go hungry, and that hurts so bad you’re back to wanting to hold him forever.

“It’s okay. I’ll tell my mom to spoil you rotten.”

A faint yellow blush colors his cheeks. “Please don’t do that.”

You snicker. “I’ll spoil you rotten instead?”

“Better.”

It doesn’t take long for him to gulp down the water and stuff the protein bar into his mouth. He pops about six cough drops in his mouth at once and makes a big show of smearing the chapstick _everywhere._ Then he’s up, heading for the ablution block. You’re pleased by how much steadier he is now, the static dissipating as he regains control of his pan, his posture relaxed rather than military-straight or weight-of-the-world bowed. He just seems content, the way a troll _should_ if the world worked right, and you think this is what you two should strive toward.

You follow him into the ablution block with your Very Important Pale Bag in hand, closing and latching the door behind you even though the door to your respiteblock is already locked. Psi tugs at his suit and then pauses, looking up at you.

“Do you want…?” he says, gesturing to the zipper.

“Mmm.” You bridge the two-step gap between you, your hands reaching for the fabric. “It’s okay?”

“Wouldn’t ask. If it wasn’t, I mean.”

You have seen Psi naked what feels like ten thousand times – half the time he sleeps curled up against you in your ‘coon. Well, more than half the time. The other half the time, he’s supposed to switch off with Di, but since they’re both pretty clingy people they have a habit of both squishing into the ‘coon with you at once. You make a big show of grumbling about it, but to be honest it’s hard not to be content when you have your moirail curled up asleep on one shoulder and your wife on the other. It’s like every good thing in the universe condensed at once. Even if it does mean you all end up with at least one elbow to the face.

Undressing him, though, is a different matter. You’ve only done it a few times, and half of those were because his hands were shaking too hard to get his clothes off himself. There’s a certain intensity to it, a soft vulnerability. You pull down the zipper and ease the fabric off his shoulders, trailing your fingertips down his sides as you tug it off. He steps easily out once you have it pooled down to his ankles, chirping once. When you look up, you can see that his gaze is fixed absently on the far wall, but his little grin tells you he’s drifting whole and calm, which is fine by you.

You pull his boxers off more quickly (getting them off is not exactly the point here, after all), and nudge him toward the circular tub. “In you go.”

He settles in the tub as you turn the water on, leaning back against the edge, though not before you see the thin yellow claw marks scoring his back. You sigh and sit behind him, pulling a washcloth from the side of the tub and wetting it in the water. “You’ve been scratching.”

“I have not!”

“Either you’ve been scratching or you’ve had some really impressive black flings lately, and I know how hard you are not getting laid.”

“Wow. Rude.”

You set the washcloth to his back, cleaning away the sweat and grime around the wounds – the last thing he needs is an infection. “Have you been brushing your fangs?”

“I brush them twice a night!” he says, affronted. “My mouth feels gross if I don’t.”

“What about trimming your claws? Washing your hair? Taking off dead skin?”

“Uh.”

You kiss his hair. “I see we have our work cut out for us.” When all of the yellow marks are clean, you add, “Give me your hand.”

You shift to the side of the tub and take the hand he stretches toward you, your own free hand digging through the bag again. Pulling out a file, you set to work carefully trimming down the points of each of his claws, still long and sharp enough to be used as weapons if the need rises, but short enough not to hurt himself with absentminded scratching. He relaxes against the side of the tub, leaning back and shutting his eyes, his throat bared.

“Mmm. Sign,” he murmurs when you start on the second hand.

“Yeah?”

“Only you could make personal hygiene kinky.”

“Aha. I’ve finally cracked the code for how to make you take care of yourself.”

His blue eye opens and he blows a raspberry in your general direction. “You’re an ass.”

“Guard my secret carefully from the masses.”

It doesn’t take too long to finish his hands, so you nudge him to duck under the water and scrub shampoo through his damp curls. He tries to headbutt your hands, a tiny little purr rumbling in his chest, like an aloof meowbeast pretending not to crave affection.

You have him wash that out quickly but massage conditioner into his roots, and this you let sit as you pick up the file again and smooth the ragged parts of his horns. That gets more of a reaction, little chirps and whines, though that may have more to do with the way your free hand is holding his head steady.

Now that he’s not only come back to himself, but managing to give himself over, you start on a different kind of murmuring. “You work so hard, love,” you mumble against the shell of his ear, which twitches back toward you. You pull back so you can properly see his horns, little yellow and orange flakes shedding under the file. “You work so fucking hard for all of us, to keep us all safe, you don’t even realize how hard you work.”

“I don’t,” he protests, but it’s soft and weak and he’s still purring as you hum.

You finish his first large horn and start on the smaller one beside it. “You do, love, you do. You make yourself sick for us, you know that? You get so hyperfocused on safety and strategy and information you forget to sleep and eat. I love you so much, I love you so much, you work so hard and you hurt so much, you don’t have to be so scared all the time.”

“Have to keep – keep – mnfghn, keep you safe.”

“I know.” You kiss the side of his smoothed-down horn. “You just get so stuck in your own head, love. I wish I could take everything away from you, all the voices and the visions and the memories, I wish I could take them all away. I wish I could keep you from suffering like you do, you don’t deserve it, shh, not ever.”

His breath hitches. “I’m gonna screw up so bad, Sign.”

“Don’t think about it. You’re not in the future now, you’re with me, remember? We’re not finished here.” You kiss his horn again. “I love you so much, so so much, no matter what you do. I love you so much. Stay with me. Just let me take care of you, please, you deserve that much after everything you’ve suffered.”

He lets out a warbling little sound and pulls his hand out of the water, splashing droplets over the side as he reaches back toward your face. “Love you too,” he slurs, dragging a blind pap across your cheek.

You can’t help smiling. “I know, you goddamn wreck. I know. Don’t go completely under on me yet, I still have to get you back to the pile.”

“Finish fast then, I want…”

“I was going to spend some time taking off the dead skin that’s making you itch in the first place.”

“Nangh.” Both hands exit the tub now, his torso shifting around as he turns and bites your shoulder. Not hard enough to bleed, but definitely enough to sting. What a little shit. “Tomorrow?” he asks, teeth still in your skin.

He’s never let go with you more than one night in a row before; his stress levels don’t allow it. He is wholly convinced that taking more than a few hours off in a perigree will send the entire world crumbling down around your heads. So you consider this progress, even if he’ll probably throw a pillow at you when he wakes up in the evening and tell you that you cannot possibly hold him to shit he said in the washes of pale contentment.

“Okay,” you tell him, and he releases your shoulder and slides back down in the tub. “I’m still finishing your horns, though. If I stop halfway through that you’ll go shithive the first time you look at your reflection.”

“No arguments here,” he says, and you continue the filing in companionable silence.

Once all four of his horns look about as neat and shiny as you can get them, you wash out the conditioner and drag him out of the tub. Even despite your earlier protest, he’s half-boneless anyway, flopping against you and nuzzling your shoulder. You scrub him down once with a towel, just to keep the blanket pile from getting too soggy, and then bodily haul him back over to it. He burrows between the layers of softness like a tiny squeakbeast seeking protection, and you follow behind him, hugging him close. Your chin rests between his horns, one of his thin arms wrapping around your waist and anchoring you there.

“Still here?” you ask.

“Barely,” he says, and kisses your collarbone.

“How long do you want to stay under?”

“A couple hours?” he says, and pauses. “Three. No, four? Four hours.”

You kiss his hair, draping an arm over him in turn and rubbing a gentle circle on his upper back. “You sure? You’ll be pretty out-of-it for at least two nights after.”

“’Sokay. Need to – to stop being me for a little while. Just long enough to rest. Please.”

A renewed stab of pity shoots through your chest, but you know what he means. It’s so hard for him to will his conscious thought down into something quiet enough to let him relax, and doing so tends to leave him more exhausted than he was in the first place. Sometimes he just needs to be lulled into a place where he can’t think, where the pain and fear and constant ticking can’t get to him.

You can do that. That’s what you’re here for.

“Okay,” you say. “Let go. I got you, I’ll keep you safe.”

You start a gentle rhythm of rubbing and soothing and massaging his torso, fingertips pressing between his shoulderblades and down the sides of his spine and over his ribs. You can tell when he slips away completely because he goes as relaxed as putty in your arms, mindlessly purring and nosing against the hollow of your throat, his system so flooded by drowsy chemicals that he can’t put together a coherent thought.

Sleep has never been the most peaceful means of relaxation available for your species. The day terrors are always waiting, especially for Psi, who screams even when he’s covered in sopor slime. Instead you have this -- _blissing out_ , as the slang term goes. Psi isn’t in danger of dropping off to sleep, but he is drifting off somewhere with his baser instincts, his higher intellectual power switched off so that his pan can sort itself out without baseless interruptions. It takes a lot of trust for a troll to rest like this in front of someone else, a thousand times more than it does to bare a throat, but Psi knows you’ve got him and hell if you’re going to let him down. He trusts you so much it aches. You couldn’t bring yourself to hurt him if you tried, especially not like this, not when he’s stretched out and content and you want him to be happy and safe always.

You kiss his hair and horns and keep rubbing his back, talking soft nonsense about how much you love him and how much he deserves, but after a while you start to drift too. Not completely zoning out – after all, one of you has to be aware enough of your surroundings to care for the other – but still dozing. A few times you try to wiggle yourself out of his grip to go grab a book or start cleaning up, but he whines and bunches his fist up in your cloak to hold you there and well, fuck if you can say no to that.

So you’re almost as relaxed as he is when you realize what time it is and wince. “Love,” you say, tapping his lower back.

He trills at you.

“Time to come back, love.” You roll him onto his stomach and curl your hands around his ribs, pressing your thumbs into his lower back to massage it. The resulting ache isn’t enough to startle him out of his daze (something which would leave him grumpy and disoriented for _ages_ ), but it is enough to tug his floating consciousness back down to the ground.

“Nnannngh?” he says, his red eye opening and doing its best to focus on you, ears flicking.

He’s so cute you can’t even breathe. “Come back,” you say, kneading deeper into his muscles. “You’re drooling all over the pillows.”

“Mmrngh,” he responds, which you’re pretty sure means _go shove a culling fork up your waste chute._

“Come on. It’s only a few hours until sunset, we both need to catch some shut-eye. Just wake up enough to get into a ‘coon, okay? Di said if we wanted, we could both sleep with her.”

“Sssfnsgahnd?” he says. With no small effort, both of his eyes open and he rolls onto his back of his own accord. That’s good, he’s wrapping himself back into his body. “S’nsgud,” he tries again, his tongue refusing to wrap around the syllables. “Dammmnnnnit. Sounsgood.”

“You are so fucking out of it.” You disentangle some of the blankets and help him sit up.

“’Eels’ice.”

“You’re all good?” You find his hand, squeeze his fingers.

“Feel good,” he confirms.

When he tries to stand, he’s wobbly, like an antlerbeast trying to balance on its own for the first time. You join him and hold him around the waist, letting him wrap his arm around your shoulders. He’s still naked as the day he was hatched, but Di’s block is just a corner from here, so you have no problem nudging him out of your room and into hers without interruption. Cleanup can wait for later, you’re both exhausted.

Di’s sound asleep in the ‘coon, but as the door shuts she sits up, rubbing her eyes. “Aha, my _boys_ , I thought you’d vanished into pale hell purrever.”

“Prrever’s pretty – pretty, nnhn, acc’rate,” Psi says, and unceremoniously climbs in next to her.

She sniffs his neck as you strip off your clothing. “You do not smell static-y at all. Maybe I’ll even get to hunt without all the game getting scared off!”

“Mmmaybe they jus’ don’t like how _you_ smell, ever thoughta _that_ …”

“Just because you do not like the smell of nature does not mean the animals don't, you butt.”

You squeeze yourself into the ‘coon beside them. For a brief moment, all three of you struggle to fit your legs together in any sort of comfortable way, but then Di and Psi are both settling down, Di halfway back to sleep and Psi halfway there already.

“Hey, Sign? Di?” His eyes are closed, and though the sopor’s taking effect he’s starting to gain coherence as the relaxation wears off.

“Yeah?”

“Love you,” he says, and you both barely have the energy to muster up “love you too”s before all three of you are asleep.


End file.
